Educational Media Reviews Online

For a brief moment in time, in March 1963, the paths of five year old Beate Kernke and the Neil Clark family converged. Major Clark, American Red Cross field director, served as the escort of the child on her journey from Doberlug-Kirchhain, East Germany across the Berlin Wall into West Germany and on to the United States. Beate’s German mother Irmgard had been unable to keep her, and her American GI father had returned to the US, so while she was born in West Berlin, she was placed with her grandparents in the east. The Forgetting Game is the story of the how Beate was reunited with her mother and how her journey touched the lives of the Clark family and Beate herself.

The first Berlin Wall was simply wire, but the East Germans quickly began to build a more substantial structure and to use violence to keep their citizens from crossing into the west. The difference between east and west was “almost like going from black and white to color when you crossed the wall.” At the time, to the west, the Wall was a symbol of all that was ugly and oppressive in communist Germany. Beate’s journey was the result of collaboration between the American Red Cross and East German Red Cross plus a year’s worth of intense paper work.

The Clark children wondered what had happened to the little girls who lived in their home for a week, but with only a first name they were unable to find her. However,Beate’s life in America has not played out as a fairy tale. She was a troubled young adult who joined the Air Force ‘to get off probation." Filmmaker Russell Shaeffer was able to reconnect the Clarks with Beate. All have very vivid memories of their brief encounter, yet curiously neither the Red Cross nor the German government has any corporate memories of the event.

More than just a touching story of the reunion of long ago acquaintances, The Forgetting Game is an exploration of memory crafted with a mix of personal interviews of members of both families, archival footage from official and unofficial sources, family photographs, official documents, and inserts of Super 8 film to transition the story. The original score is evocative and haunting. Recommended for public and university libraries.